Dual operating systems?

[Barb]

My son bought a game that's compatible with Windows XP. However, his Dell laptop runs Vista and, at one point, the game crashed his laptop.

I guess he could partition the laptop's hard drive to run WinXP and Vista on different drives. How does one go about doing this? Are there tutorials or instructions on the 'net he could use?

 

[GrnMarvl14]

What game was it? There might be an easier solution than creating a dual boot. In some cases, there's nothing more than a file that would have to be downloaded (a lot of games had issues with Vista's video driver).

Though, if you're just wanting to create a dual boot anyway, there are plenty of places online.

 

[!Tommy]

Well, the trick is you have to wipe everything that's on the computer (simplest way). Then create two separate partitions. What you have to do in any case is install the oldest OS first. So first you'd install Windows XP, and then you install Windows Vista on the second partition. Make sure you at least have drivers for your network device so you can get back online in case the OS doesn't recognize it.

 

[Barb]

It was a Star Wars PC game, but I don't remember the title of it.

 

[pixies and fairies]

How big (in terms of GB) is his hard drive? It makes a difference about how you partition it-you don't want to give one partition too much or too little.

Trust me, I made that mistake with partitioning Fedora and giving it way more space than I gave my XP partition, and I regret it now, but I don't feel like reformatting everything...